Biweekly links for 03/30/2009

One of my favourite essays. Written by the co-creator of Unix, Ken Thompson, this is the text of his Turing Award lecture. In it, he explains a beautiful hack to put a backdoor into the Unix login program, a backdoro that would let him login to any Unix system. I doubt his superiors at AT&T thought it was all that funny.

“PDFMiner is a suite of programs that aims to help extracting or analyzing text data from PDF documents. Unlike other PDF-related tools, it allows to obtain the exact location of texts in a page, as well as other layout information such as font size or font name, which could be useful for analyzing the document. It can be also used as a basis for a full-fledged PDF interpreter.”

Thoughtful discussion of the difficulty of capturing _process_, not just facts, or ideas, or relationships. Ties in with many other important issues in open science: the importance of the context in which data was taken, and how tacit knowledge affects that data; how to represent process online in a way that is useful.

“[I]f one wants to use a telescope to study something in the sky, one must write a proposal 6 months in advance, submit it for scrutiny, and then await your allocation of time on a telescope. The process can take nearly a year and then after your night staring at the stars, it can take a further year to analyse the data (assuming it wasn’t cloudy!). Only then are we ready to ask questions of the data and test our observations against our original hypothesis written two years ago in a haste!

With the Zoo, it’s all a little too quick! For example, I can ask the question “how many galaxies have a bar through the middle of them” and typically I would embark on a career-long quest to answer this fundamental question. I may even recruit some poor graduate student to eyeball 50,000 galaxies to answer the question (like they did with Kevin!). But now, two days after the launch, we already have the data to address this question and it’s a little too fast for an old-timer like me. “

“My muse for the session was this quote from Walt Disney: “We don’t make movies to make money, we make money to make more movies.” To me, that’s it. That’s the thing… Obsession times voice is a pretty good stab at a simple formula for doing it right.”

“we estimate that it would take approximately $10.8 billion to build the Fedora 9 distribution in today’s dollars, with today’s software development costs. Additionally, it would take $1.4 billion to develop the Linux kernel alone. This paper outlines our technique and highlights the latest costs of developing Linux. “

“One customer, for example, identifies himself as a Ph.D. student in aerospace engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He or she (there is no name on the order) is interested in purchasing a 200-page dissertation. The student writes that the dissertation must be “well-researched” and includes format requirements and a general outline. Attached to the order is a one-page description of Ph.D. requirements taken directly from MIT’s Web site. The student also suggests areas of emphasis like “static and dynamic stability of aircraft controls.””

More in the Moorcock vein. It's easy to imagine the reaction of the critic, holding their nose at writing to formula. But you can turn that around, regarding Dent (and, more plausibly, Moorcock) as a student and theoretician of structure. And that's a pretty powerful point of view. Of course, word-by-word Dent is a poor […]

Fascinating both intrinsically, and for the commentary. The commentary first: part of the interest is from people who desire an easy way to write (or, more accurately, to have written). But there is also clearly a genuine interest on the part of many: what does this guy know that I don't about storytelling? You may […]

Kevin Kelly interviews Brian Eno. Slow to get going, but fascinating. Eno proposes "process, not product", says that it's his "ease of seduction" that means he often gets things first, talks about putting more "Africa" into computers, and generally makes many interesting comments.

Documentary of Wolfgang Steiner, one of the world's top ski-jumpers in the 1970s. The spine of the documentary is a sequence of extraordinary shots of Steiner's jumps, taken with a pair of high-speed cameras.

Remarkable survey of the cutting edge of surfing. We see the origins of tow-rope surfing (where surfers are pulled by jet skis into waves that are too big to paddle out to), the use of hydrofoil designs that put the board a foot or two _above_ the wave, and even the use of weather stations […]